Harvard to investigate human learning, use data to build new AIs

The project, announced earlier this week, wants to bring artificial intelligence closer to reality by gaining a greater understanding of how human learning operates. As Engadget reports, three departments at Harvard University have received a total of $28 million from the U.S. government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to investigate how the brain learns new things so quickly. The project aims to record activity in the brain’s visual cortex and map the connections it makes while learning. The researchers will be analysing the brain in “unprecedented detail” with the aim of generating a petabyte of data – 1000 terabytes, or enough to fill 1.6 million CDs – that can then be used to create computer algorithms capable of recreating the brain’s learning process. The investigation was designed in response…